


the war is over and we are beginning

by theviolonist



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Fluff, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-23
Updated: 2012-07-23
Packaged: 2017-11-10 13:29:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/466822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theviolonist/pseuds/theviolonist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The morning after, Tony Stark walks into the SHIELD kitchen with a tall redhead wearing three-inch pumps and the kind of smile Bruce swore he'd never fall for again.</p><p>"Hey, green guy," Tony says to Bruce, grabbing an apple from Bruce's plate and biting neatly into it. "This is Pepper."</p><p>Bruce's plane is leaving at 7:00 PM.</p><p>Bruce stays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the war is over and we are beginning

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Stars' In Our Bedroom After the War.

Bruce didn't even want to come. But apparently even the superhero version of the Frankenstein monster can't say no to Natasha Romanov, so there he is, saving the world.  
  
Along the way, he meets Tony Stark. Tony is a real old-school genius, complete with the tumbler of whiskey, sharp wit, precise cynicism and auto-derision disguised as snark. Bruce likes interesting people.  
  
They save the world together. Bruce doesn't remember much of it, but apparently it was fun. Bruce packs his suitcase the night after New York isn't destroyed.  
  
The morning after, Tony Stark walks into the SHIELD kitchen with a tall redhead wearing three-inch pumps and the kind of smile Bruce swore he'd never fall for again.  
  
"Hey, green guy," Tony says to Bruce, grabbing an apple from Bruce's plate and biting neatly into it. "This is Pepper."  
  
Bruce's plane is leaving at 7:00 PM.  
  
Bruce stays.  
  
*  
  
Bruce has never been that talkative, but Tony talks enough for two, so it isn't really a problem. Instead, Bruce observes. He observes Tony's face, the sharp traits and chiseled jaw; he observes the distance between his body and Pepper's, the way it seems unnatural, removed, like they used to stand closer. He doesn't say anything. He isn't good at saying things.  
  
Tony makes all the Avengers move into the Stark tower and manages to make it seem like he didn't do it out of generosity or friendship. Bruce knows better, especially when Tony gives him a lab next to his.  
  
"Knock if you need anything," Tony says when he gives Bruce the key, and then thinks for a moment before he amends himself: "Well. Or call Pepper, you know, because I might bite your head off."  
  
Bruce tries for a smile. His face doesn't really agree, so it probably ends up looking more like an awkward grimace, but it's the intent that counts, right?  
  
Tony looks surprised for a quarter of a second, and then catches himself, smiles: "Go on, then," he says with his mouth full of shark teeth (Bruce isn't fooled). "Go play with your new toys."  
  
Bruce does.  
  
*  
  
Bruce doesn't have a real conversation with Pepper until she knocks on the door of his lab three weeks later. Bruce is working on something with the Higgs boson – it's a little outside his area of experience but it's fascinating and Tony gave him the tools, so he figured why not?  
  
Pepper comes in and turns down Nina Simone's _I put a spell on you_ , humming along softly.  
  
Bruce blinks. "Sorry," he says. "I didn't hear you over the -" he gestures to the player "music."  
  
Pepper laughs and waves it off. "It's okay, I'm used to it. You have better taste than Tony, I’ll give you that – with him I barely hear anything else than 'old rock legends'."  
  
Bruce smiles. "Figures," he says, ducking his head.  
  
"Did you eat at all in the last two days?" Pepper asks, looking half-worried and half-amused.  
  
If Bruce were fifteen, he probably would've blushed. As it is, he mumbles, a little awkwardly: "I – sorry, this research is so fascinating, it's -"  
  
Pepper puts a hand up to stop him. "I know, Tony told me." Bruce didn't know Tony even _knew_ , but again, it figures, especially given that there's an all-knowing robot entity in the house – well, tower. "Fainting won't do your research much good, though," she adds, and then: "And I'm sure the Higgs boson can survive a few minutes without you, right?"  
  
"You're right," Bruce says. Pepper looks a little surprised, like she isn't used to being told that. She probably isn't, actually, with Stark for a boss.  
  
"I'll have someone bring you something," she says, turning on her heels, and mumbles, loud enough so that he can hear: "Great, now I have two anorexic geniuses to take care of."  
  
Bruce laughs. He thinks Pepper may have smiled in return.  
  
She turns around when her hand is on the doorknob, tilts her head and says: "I prefer the Screamin' Jay Hawkins version, though."  
  
If Bruce were this type of person, he would say he's in love.  
  
*  
  
It's Clint who tells Bruce about Pepper and Tony.  
  
They're talking about the new villain in town, a lizard thing with a lot of teeth (for a change), when Clint says: "At least Stark'll have Pepper to lick his wounds with him," with a dirty smile.  
  
"I – what?" says Bruce, very eloquently.  
  
Clint looks surprised at Bruce's ignorance. "Dude, you didn't know? They've been together for, like, two years now. For some reason Pepper hasn't dumped his ass."  
  
"Huh," Bruce says, still very eloquently.  
  
"Yeah," Clint says solemnly, mistaking his astonishment for approval.  
  
Bruce doesn't correct him.  
  
*  
  
Bruce doesn't really know when the Stark tower started to feel like home instead of an extended vacation. It's strange, mainly because nowhere ever felt like home since he became the Hulk. Someone other than him would probably take it in stride, but Bruce is notoriously bad at taking things in stride. Instead, he deals.  
  
Meaning, he drinks a lot.  
  
Tony, being just as notoriously good at drinking, joins him.  
  
*  
  
"Man," Bruce says sluggishly, and then finds that he's forgotten what the rest of his sentence was supposed to be. "Man," he repeats.  
  
"You're bad at drinking," Tony says judgingly, and how is he still standing up after those twenty shots and four whiskeys, Bruce will never know.  
  
"G-got unused," Bruce stutters, and then doesn't say anything because he gets a bad case of the hiccups.  
  
Tony sighs. He calls a car and stuffs Bruce in it as well as he can (which is, not very well), bellowing his address to the driver because he's a little drunk too. The driver sighs, but it's not everyday that you get to take a smashed Iron Man home – and is that the Hulk in a puddle in the backseat? Wow.  
  
"Your face is pretty," Bruce giggles – _giggles_ – to Tony when Tony puts him to bed, undressing him down to his boxers, and then frowns when he feels Tony's fingers on his bare sides: "Tickles."  
  
Tony sort of half-smiles. You can still see the end of his teeth peeking from between his lips, because he's still Tony Stark. "Yeah, well, deal with it, big boy," he says, but it's almost affectionate.  
  
When Bruce wakes up the next morning with a sour mouth and a pounding head, Pepper's left a cup of tea on his nightstand. Next to it is a note that simply says, in loopy, elegant handwriting: _Idiots._  
  
No one can see him except for the twelve cameras and JARVIS; Bruce lets himself smile.  
  
*  
  
For all they're supposed to be together, Pepper and Tony don't actually look like a couple. It's obvious if you know them, of course – and that too is strange, thinking that he _knows_ them, that they're his _friends_ -, but Bruce had kind of figured Tony would be the PDA type.  
  
Instead, their relationship is discreet, made of Pepper's elegance and Tony's recklessness, all in shared smiles and dirty glances. There are hands touching hips and for some reason it makes Bruce feel electric, like he's seeing something private he isn't allowed to see.  
  
He looks away, silently approving. _Good_ , he thinks without really knowing why, and goes back to work.  
  
*  
  
Bruce still doesn't know what to think of the other Avengers. Actually, he doesn't know what to think of the Avengers, period. He's still trying to figure if he finally belongs somewhere (if they all do) or if they're all just a bunch of fucked-up misfits.  
  
He feels like the answer might be more complicated, might be somewhere in the gray between those two. He's surprisingly okay with that. He's used to complicated. Complicated is easy.  
  
*  
  
(There's Natasha Romanoff – she's the one who came to get him, and he still sees her like he did that day, red and fiery and strong, more than a woman, more than a warrior. He admires her, even though her strength is probably damning.  
  
There's Steve Rogers, the loyal soldier. He's trying to be clean-cut and the perfect American archetype of a superhero, even lets Tony tease him about being Fury's favorite, but in reality he's a bundle of issues, most of them still melting with the ice. Bruce watches for the explosion.  
  
There's Thor Odison (or "God of Thunder", as he insists on being called). Bruce watches him from the sidelines. Clint says something about him and Loki kissing and making up, and Bruce thinks that there's probably more kissing than anything else. It's not his place to say, so he doesn't.  
  
There's Clint Barton. He's probably the one Bruce relates to the most, and it's a little ironic, seeing how he's the smallest of them, the one that slips into the cracks to unhook bombs. Clint knows silence and sarcasm; he knows how to stand crouched on a roof for hours without moving. Bruce appreciates that.  
  
And there's Tony. Tony, who Bruce still hasn't figured out. Tony, who spent most of his life making the first page of every national tabloid. Tony, who comes as a package deal with Pepper. Tony.  
  
There's a whole gallery of other people around them, too – Loki and Jane and Phil and Fury and Pepper, Pepper, Pepper.  
  
Bruce doesn't know what to think of the Avengers. He still thinks about them a lot.)  
  
*  
  
He must be falling pretty hard, because after a few weeks Steve manages to make him leave his lab and sit down in one of Tony's ridiculous living-rooms (he has at least ten, all with elegant, uber-modern furniture, plush carpets and a minibar. He never uses them, of course, but he says that "Better safe than sorry" is a motto of his. He also has a lot of mottos). At least he gives him alcohol.  
  
"Bruce," Steve says, looking concerned. Bruce doesn't know how he came to care about Steve, but he did. It hits him hard, like everything.  
  
Steve is not very good at confessions, Bruce learnt that too. None of them are. "I just don't want you getting hurt," Steve says. He ducks his head, then looks back up. He looks determined; scared, too. Sometimes Bruce admires him.  
  
"It's a little late for that, don't you think?"  
  
"You're probably right."  
  
Steve takes a sip. He doesn't drink, usually, but Tony is corrupting him, the same way they all are, in some way or another.  
  
"You don't know what you're doing," Steve tries again.  
  
Bruce nods. "I don't."  
  
"Look, I – I appreciate Tony, but he has issues, and -"  
  
 _And you don't?_ Bruce asks him over the rim of his glass.  
  
"All I'm asking is, are you sure you want to deal with that? And did you think about how it's going to affect the team?"  
  
There it is, Bruce thinks, a little amused. Steve, by all accounts except the obvious, is still a kid. Sometimes Bruce forgets that. His loyalty aches like an old war injury.  
  
"Don't worry about it," Bruce says. "There's Pepper, too."  
  
Steve sighs, but he smiles, a little smile but a smile anyway. Bruce counts the conversation as a win, even though it didn't resolve anything.  
  
*  
  
The thing is, Bruce doesn't want sex. He wants other things: kindness, intelligence, genius, and if he's lucky, this feeling of belonging the narrow-minded call love.  
  
*  
  
Once, Tony invites him to dinner with Pepper. They go to the restaurant, a fancy, stuffy thing with white-jacketed waiters and gleaming cutlery. Pepper and Tony look in their element. Bruce isn't really sure how he looks. He wonders why they chose him.  
  
"Why did you choose me?" he asks.  
  
Tony shrugs. "It's not like we were going to choose _Steve_ ," he says.  
  
And just like that, it's settled.  
  
*  
  
Bruce watches Pepper and Tony kiss in the taxi. It's rushed and languorous at the same time, his hand pushing into her hair like his fingers can't quite reach her skull, hers flat against his chest, over the arc reactor. She's a bit flushed when they part, and he's smiling, smug.  
  
"Enjoying the show, Banner?" Tony asks with a leer, brushing his thumb against the bone of Pepper's hip.  
  
Bruce thinks for a moment. "Yes," he says.  
  
Tony laughs, and Pepper settles against his side. Bruce can hear their breathing, synchronized, and he thinks about sleeping in the intervals between their inhales.  
  
*  
  
"Nice catch," Natasha says to Bruce once as she brushes past him in the corridor, all leather-clad, as usual (but Bruce has seen her watch Clint with her arrow-eyes, he isn't fooled).  
  
*  
  
The day before Pepper kisses Bruce for the first time, Tony kisses him. It's a little unexpected, but Bruce is pretty certain there's nothing you can expect less than being turned into a big green monster, so he thinks he's covered on that front.  
  
It's nothing big. They're preparing to go out to fight yet another bad guy, and Tony is in full armor except for the helmet, checking his weapons.  
  
"Time to get down to business," he says with a Tony grin, the one that for some reason Bruce's brain assimilates with home now.  
  
Then he takes a step forward and kisses Bruce thoroughly, a dirty kiss on the rocks with two ice cubes. Bruce kisses back.  
  
Five minutes later, he's twelve stories tall, and he doesn't really care.  
  
*  
  
It's different when Pepper kisses him. She comes into his lab, looking pristine as usual, her hair up in a bun.  
  
"Your hair looks better when it's down," Bruce tells her without really meaning to.  
  
Pepper smiles and undoes her hair. It falls on her shoulders, and to Bruce it feels like breathing, like a slow burn.  
  
She comes closer, her pumps clicking on the tiled floor, takes hold of his forearm, takes off his glasses.  
  
"Is this okay?" she says. Bruce assumes she means kissing. Her mouth is painted very red, as usual.  
  
"Yes," he says. He doesn't know if there's another answer.  
  
They kiss, and it's sweet and it only tastes a little like gunpowder. They only pull away when Tony comes in.  
  
"A party and no one invited me?" he pouts from where he is, leaning against the doorframe. "I'm wounded."  
  
They don't mind the interruption.  
  
*  
  
"It's a most peculiar thing, the way the Man of Iron and the Lady Potts dote over you," Thor booms at breakfast one day. If Bruce hadn't been awake before, he certainly is now.  
  
"Hum," he says, and then looks at Thor in a way that he hopes conveys, _you're in a place to talk_.  
  
Thor laughs. It sounds like a car explosion. Bruce winces.  
  
"That is most true, my brother," Thor shouts – there is no other word, there really isn't –, slapping Bruce's back heartily (meaning, actually threatening to break his spine. Thank God for meditation). "I must admit you make a point."  
  
Bruce goes back to munching on his cereals in relative peace – at least until Thor dislocates his shoulder by shaking it to ask:  
  
"Now, you must explain to me how this device for frying the bread works, for it is most riveting!"  
  
If Bruce were a less patient sort of man, he'd facepalm. As it is, he just sighs and shows Thor how the damn thing works.  
  
*  
  
It’s not that Bruce doesn’t _like_ sex; he just doesn’t care about it. It’s always mildly enjoyable, the way a warm bath is enjoyable, and since most people expect it to go with love, Bruce does it.  
  
Explaining that to Tony is less difficult than Bruce expected.  
  
They’re sprawled in a couch, Tony’s fingers idly brushing against Bruce’s shoulder, not quite caressing it. It’s nice.  
  
“I could blow you,” Tony says, all of a sudden.  
  
Bruce swallows. He isn’t one to be nervous, but for some reason he is now, he feels like his body is just one big, too tightly strung guitar wire, ready to snap.  
  
“No, thank you,” he answers. He has to start somewhere; this is as good a place as any. (For some reason it makes him remember the war, because there too you have to choose where you start to rebuild on the ashes, no one tells you.)  
  
Tony looks up, surprised and grinning. “No?” he asks simply.  
  
Bruce shrugs, a little awkwardly, adjusting his glasses. “I’m not really... into that sort of thing.”  
  
Tony is still grinning. “That sort of thing?” he asks.  
  
“Sex.”  
  
Tony is silent for all of thirty seconds before he drains his glass of whiskey, laughs at himself and says: “Well, I guess Pepper and I have enough sex drive for three.”  
  
(The thing Bruce would’ve never imagined about this, in the end, is how simple Tony is, underneath his complexity.)  
  
They stay like this for a little while, Bruce waiting for Tony to get restless, and then Pepper comes in, complaining about something Tony hasn’t done. He grins up at her and offers a foot massage.  
  
“Damn right I want a foot massage,” she says indignantly, sprawling on them. “You owe me at least that.”  
  
That’s how the afternoons ends: with Pepper’s feet on Tony’s lap, Tony laughing and working out the knots with his fingers, and her head on Bruce’s thighs, Bruce’s fingers carding through the ginger strands.  
  
*  
  
At some point Loki captures Bruce by injecting him a serum that keeps him from hulking out (Bruce half wants to ask, to not care about the dark magic and the ethics of it all, just to be _delivered_ ). Loki keeps him in a basement for forty-eight hours, tied to a chair, half unconscious.  
  
The third day, Iron Man breaks through the window and punches Loki in the face. Bruce winces. Thor probably isn’t going to like that (he’s a little - no, actually, scratch that, a _lot_ \- possessive, he doesn’t like it when people who are not him injure his brother).  
  
When Loki wakes up, chained to the bed, he smirks. “Oh, I see,” he says. “The Man of Iron rescuing his beloved, am I right?”  
  
Tony doesn’t deny. He punches Loki in the face again, calls SHIELD so that they can imprison him (or at least do the best they can, since ‘restraining Loki’ isn’t a thing they’re generally very good at), and flies Bruce back to the Stark tower.  
  
Pepper rushes towards them as soon as they land. Bruce kind of half-wonders how many years it took her to be able to run in stilettos like that.  
  
“Are you okay?” she asks.  
  
“Not really,” he answers. He hurts in more places he thought he even _had_ on his body.  
  
“Right,” she says, as focused and perfunctory as always.  
  
Judging him in good hands, Bruce’s brain decides to make him pass out.  
  
The next time he wakes up, Pepper and Tony are both there. Pepper is right next to him, typing something on a little laptop, and Tony’s working on a robot in a corner.  
  
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Pepper says, and bends to kiss him. Bruce will remember the imprint her fingers made on his biceps when she squeezed a little, her nails digging in the littlest bit, just to say, _look, you’re alive_.  
  
“Don’t get cheesy, Peps,” Tony snarks from his corner.  
  
Bruce isn’t fooled, and neither is Pepper.  
  
“Oh, shut up,” she says, and ignores Tony’s fake-gasp, “and I told you not to call me Peps.”  
  
Being the child that he is when he isn’t a genius, Tony parrots ‘Peps’ until he gets bored (hint: soon). Bruce couldn’t explain why they all end up smiling, but they do.  
  
*  
  
Once he’s working in his lab and Tony kneels in front of him and blows him.  
  
Once he watches Tony and Pepper fuck from the corner of the bed, and when they’re finished he lets them pull him in so he can sleep near them, not entwined because they aren’t this kind of people, but close enough that he can feel the heat they radiate.  
  
Once they win a fight and Pepper is so relieved to find them alive that she kisses both of them like it’s her last day on earth, in indiscriminate order.  
  
Once the three of them make out in a dressing room in _Dolce & Gabbana_, even though Pepper says Tony has horrible taste.  
  
It’s strange, sometimes surprising, terrifying, exhilarating, exciting, but it works.  
  
*  
  
(Bruce doesn’t know how the Stark towers became the Avengers mansion. Probably when they all moved in.  
  
One morning he finds Natasha and Clint curled on the couch, watching _La femme Nikita_ and eating Cheerios. He smiles, grabs an apple and a coke, and goes back to his lab, saluting Thor on the way.)  
  
*  
  
There’s a party where they all go, arms linked together like a three-headed hydra. Pepper’s dress is naked back and glittering sequins, Tony’s a black suit and a smirk, and Bruce is a marine suit and shiny shoes.  
  
“Here,” says Pepper, and she gives them both a glass of champagne.  
  
They clink their glasses. Some of it spills on Bruce’s hand and Tony licks it, flashing him a grin. Pepper chuckles softly.  
  
“To us,” says someone that isn’t Pepper and isn’t Tony and isn’t Bruce but is one of them, or maybe all of them.  
  
“To us,” they echo, low and amused, solemn, hesitant.  
  
They eat petits-fours and talk to people and when Tony gets fed up he drags them to the dancefloor. They dance.  
  
Bruce thinks of being like this, his back pressed against Pepper’s breasts and Tony’s breath on his neck, and he thinks about his rays, perfect and sharp, gleaming.  
  
*  
  
This story begins on another afternoon (there are plenty of them, some spent in the country, some laughing in a French city after Tony convinced them taking a jet to fly off to Cannes on a whim was a good idea, some lazy and warm in one of their beds, some electric and dizzying, spent in the golden rush of discovery, and this, this -).  
  
Pepper found a bottle of old red wine in one of Tony’s endless cellars (Bruce’s been there once, and he doesn’t think he’ll go back again - rows and rows of dark bottles, ready to pour wine upon him, and he felt like an elephant in a china shop), and she pops the cork.  
  
“Here, boys,” she says, and pours them three ball glasses.  
  
Then she reclines against Bruce’s chest - he can feel the outline of her skeleton through the thin skin of her back - and pulls Tony close, bringing his head to her knees like a petulant child.  
  
“To this,” Bruce says, pushed by an unusual courage.  
  
Tony rolls his eyes; Pepper hums, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.  
  
They clink their glasses, looking each other in the eye, and laugh.


End file.
